


in the shadows of a callous certainty

by wooden_trellis



Category: Fire Emblem Echoes: Mou Hitori no Eiyuu Ou | Fire Emblem Echoes: Shadows of Valentia
Genre: F/F, Pre-Relationship, absolutely 0 people besides me care about this but please hear me out, also quick heads up for both catria and faye alluding to/not respecting their own lives a lil, and catria is deeply distressed by it and then unloads some of her own past, build to it, but also idk, celica route!faye, faye has a really complicated relationship with "being alive", it's from a typhoon song that occupies permanent brainspace for me, so i guess when you want 2 characters who don't interact in canon to kiss, so that's this, sorry the titles a lil pretentious, trying to work through that, you have to kind of
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-08
Updated: 2020-08-08
Packaged: 2021-03-06 06:06:58
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,060
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25778644
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wooden_trellis/pseuds/wooden_trellis
Summary: Faye tends to keep to the outskirts of camp in a way that both confuses Catria and makes her deeply uncomfortable.Catria isn't sure she wants to get involved, until she feels she has to.
Relationships: Katua | Catria/Efi | Faye
Comments: 6
Kudos: 18





	in the shadows of a callous certainty

**Author's Note:**

> hi if you've never read something i've written before. welcome to hell.
> 
> faye catria is important to me. it works like this  
> Faye: because none of my friends have trauma i am to presume not only am i unique in this experience, but it is something wrong with specifically me  
> Catria: wanna hear about the time i did something very risky and reckless and only lived bc of a boy who was kinda nice (and subsequently had a crush on him)  
> Faye: :0 hold on……..
> 
> also quick warning Faye has a complete lack of regard for her own life and also catria lowkey implies she was perfectly willing to kill herself in the war of shadows so keep that in the front of your mind. 
> 
> thanks

Faye tends to keep to the outskirts of camp in a way that both confuses Catria and makes her deeply uncomfortable. It seems antithetical to a well working band like theirs—neither army nor pilgrimage, more like a collection of mercenaries on a very long, unpaid job—for anybody to stay so aloof. Mae groans when it's her job to call Faye to dinner, and Catria has seen Boey try and initiate at most two awkward and stilted conversations with Faye that ended in her glaring at him and saying he'd find shoving his foot up his own ass a better use of his time.

Catria has decided, for the most part, that it is neither her job nor her place to fix the problems of the pilgrimage. They're here to find Est, knock these pirates senseless, and then figure out their next step after that (Catria does have a sinking suspicion they'll stick around to see Celica's pilgrimage through, because Palla seems to have taken a shine to these people, and Est, in spite of having quit the military the second the war ended, can't say no to a good adventure. Clearly).

That is, until she watches Faye dive in front of an axe meant for Celica, take the brunt of it in her left arm, and keep swinging like it doesn't bother her in the slightest.

She's coerced into sticking in the center of camp after the battle, just long enough for Genny to dress the wound properly. Celica flits around her nervously, looking like she wants to cry and hug Faye and slap her all at once. Finally, it takes both Saber and Palla tag-teaming her about scouting and what their next step is to pull Celica away from her side. While the lack of hovering should make Faye feel more comfortable, she ends up looking more stricken at Celica’s absence. 

Boey and Valbar are far less mixed in their response. It's one of the few times she's seen the retired soldier look upset. They take turns lecturing her on the importance of Not Doing Dumb Shit, and word it perhaps a bit more eloquently than that.

"You could have died!" Boey shouts, a final flourish, exasperated.

"Celica was more important." And Catria knows she has to get involved somehow.

The Novis kids (Saber calls them that, and everyone else is adopting it, because they like to move in a pack even as their army grows bigger and they need a group referential) like to sleep by lakes when they can, when they sleep outside. Or the ocean, if it's nearby, because they can hear the sound of the water lapping up against the shore and it reminds them of home and lulls them to sleep more easily.

The lake also seems to be a nice place for a short, angry farm girl to glare at nothing on her own. 

Catria approaches slowly. Trying not to startle Faye, who sits on the dirt, legs crossed in front of her in the kind of way Maria or Celica never would ("my tutors say it's undignified," Maria said, age 6, one day when Catria was left in charge of her. "Unladylike." Catria points out that, unlike Maria, she's wearing trousers. The rules don't apply).

"If you're here to lecture me, you can buzz off," Faye snarls.

"I'm not." Faye turns to face her, not glaring but with a hard expression that makes it clear she doesn't trust her.

"Catria," Faye says, taking a second to pull the name from the recesses of her brain.

"Yes."

"I'm Faye."

"I am aware."

Faye lets out a little "hmph," but otherwise turns back to the water. It is neither an invitation for Catria to join, nor a rejection of her being there at all. So Catria sits next to her, takes her chances with her own life.

"How is your arm?" She asks.

"It didn't hurt."

"You took the full brunt of an axe to your forearm. It's a wonder you still have it."

"The gauntlet took most of it."

"Gaunt...let...?"

"The," Faye gestures awkwardly. There's a splint holding her arm in place across her chest, made mostly with stray branches and pieces of loose fabric torn from the cloak of a bandit they had killed in the skirmish before burying him. Burying an enemy soldier, one of the oddities of fighting for Celica instead of Macedon.

"Vambrace?"

"Yeah, whatever."

"Do you still have it?" Catria asks, and Faye rifles around for a second. There's a pocket on the inside of her cloak, she realizes, and Faye pulls the vambrace from there. Hands it to Catria. There's a long gash along the center, the metal pushed inward where the axe connected; Catria winces even thinking about the way the metal contorts there.

To call it a vambrace, too, is a bit of a stretch. It certainly is a piece of metal roughly in the shape of a forearm, that's for sure.

"Look, what do you want?" Faye asks. "Because I know you aren't here of your own free will."

"You seem like you need someone to talk to," Catria says, and it isn't a lie, because she's always got a far off look in her eye like she's thinking of someone else. Alm, probably, a name Catria heard briefly in passing. Mae had been complaining about him, some boy they'd met briefly at Zofia Castle who Celica had a history with and was now leading the Deliverance ("and him and Faye-" Mae cuts herself off, groans. "like why is she even here?" Catria does not know, or really understand, so she just leaves it).

"I'm _fine,"_ Faye asserts. 

“I have two sisters,” Catria says instead. “Palla never asked for my help when we were younger. But I figured out pretty quickly that she needed it, and I took on as many jobs as I could when she started training.”

The sunset looks nice on the lake, painting it a watery orange and red.

“She got special dispensation because of us. Most of the new recruits live at the barracks, but she could go home every day at the end of training to take care of us. Est was barely five. She would come home after a full day of training and drills and learning to fly, and she'd clean the house and make us dinner and put Est and I to bed. So I started doing as much of it as I could, the housework and caring for Est. Anything to give her time to sleep.”

“Oh.”

“And Est is, well she's always kind of needed as many sets of eyes on her as possible to stay safe. She says I nag her, but I'm just watching out. But now that she's retired and running the store, there's not much I can do for her. I don't know a thing about it, or living outside of war.”

“So, you're trying to tell me you just came to me because you need someone to help.”

Catria smiled wryly. “I'm telling you I've always lived in the shadow of my sisters,” she says. And now that Est's retired and Palla spends all her time with the Commander I'm starting to live outside of that role a bit more, and I don't know what to do.”

Faye watches the water. Avoids looking at Catria, and says nothing.

“I've always been an extension of Palla and Est. If you take that away, I don't know who I am. I just—it seems like maybe you're going through something similar. With, ah, Alm?”

“There's nothing similar between that and Alm,” Faye fires back, furrowing her eyebrows and glaring at the water. “And it's easy for you to say, isn’t it? You're all the same."

"Who all?"

"All of you. _Somebodies_ . Celica's already a princess and Alm's already leading the Deliverance and all of you are already somebody telling me that I should just be content with whatever I already am. Even if you were one with your sisters you're still a _whitewing_. An identity crisis of being slightly less of a somebody means nothing to me," Faye sneers. Her right hand is balled into a fist, left one twitching slightly in the splint.

"You only know the Whitewings in Valentia because we almost lost a war," Catria says. "We almost lost Macedon—almost lost all of Archanea—to Dohlr. We had to- I watched-” Catria sighs.

"I-I’m sorry,” Faye starts, earlier malice gone. “I didn't mean to-"

"I ran a suicide mission for the Commander," Catria says. "Macedon sided with Dohlr, under the Commander's brother. He- ugh. He kidnapped princess Maria and kept her prisoner. It kept the Commander, and us, subservient. There was- it was a long shot, but if one of us could convince Prince Marth, could convince the Altean forces to save Maria, we could be free to fight the war how we wanted to."

"Catria..."

"Palla was supposed to go. I hope you'll keep this between us, because they think they're very discreet and I don't want them to know that I know, but the Commander and Palla are _very_ close.” Faye understands the implication almost immediately. “It's a wonder she didn't follow us to Valentia, to be honest. And Est was still a kid, even though she was technically a Whitewing too. The only expend—" Catria cuts herself off. "It had to be me. I wasn't sure the commander would agree, but, well. Maybe it's because she's the middle sibling too. I think she understood, to the extent she could."

"So you went?"

Catria nods. "There was no guarantee Prince Marth would follow our request, or even listen to me, or even let me live long enough to try. He could have, probably should have, shot me down the second I approached. The Commander made me—I wrote Palla and Est letters. In case I never came back."

"That's...tough."

"There is nothing more terrifying than truly thinking you could die. And I willingly walked into it. I couldn't stay long enough to say goodbye. They couldn't know I went until I was gone or Palla would have tried to stop me."

"I didn't mean to upset you. I'm sorry."

"I don't think you need to be 'someone' to be worth being alive."

"It's just hard to take that seriously from people who, yknow, are."

"I suppose that's fair."

"I can try, though," Faye says. "Uh. Basic self preservation. It’d suck for Celica to have to tell Alm i died."

"It would suck for Celica to have to watch you die," Catria repeats back. 

"Uh, right." Faye seems unconvinced. "I'm kind of a shit conversationalist, huh," she says instead.

"Oh?"

"Gray said I was. I'm too quiet or too Alm-focused or- whatever. I don’t know."

"This wasn't a fun conversation," Catria says, and Faye winces. "But it wasn't bad, I suppose. I wouldn't mind having less, hm, loaded conversations in the future."

"I won't be very good at them," Faye says, and Catria gives her a look that is firmly Very Exasperated.

"I had a brief life as a farmer," Catria says, instead of berating her for being unable to take an invitation for friendship and move on. "Before I joined the military with Palla, I would take odd jobs in town to make some extra money. Sewing and washing clothes too."

"Were you any good at it?"

Catria purses her lips. "No. Not even slightly. I killed carrots and mangled fabric. People only paid me because I was a child and they knew our situation."

"You- you killed carrots?" Faye asks, incredulity overtaking her self deprecation. "Root vegetables?"

Catria looks away, embarrassed. "It was hard."

"They're _root vegetables_."

“It’s not like anybody told me how,” Catria tries to defend herself.

“They’re the hardiest vegetables. They’re the cacti of vegetables. You just kind of leave them.” 

“I’m glad you’re having some fun at my expense,” Catria says.

“How did you do it?”

“I’m not telling you.”

“You have to!” Catria stands up. “Come on, the suspense is killing me.” 

“You need to go to bed. It will help your arm heal.”

“Only if you tell me how you killed those poor carrots and potatoes,” Faye says, but she takes Catria’s outstretched hand anyway. Stands up unsteadily. Follows her back to camp.

**Author's Note:**

> personally i think we should let the faye and the catria kiss. if catria kissed women none of the bad stuff would have happened like every across reall life and the games. so . i'm trying to help


End file.
